From handcuffs to Harvard

Published 5:32 pm, Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Adam Saenz is a clinical psychologist, counselor, author and speaker. His new book is called "The Power of a Teacher."

Adam Saenz is a clinical psychologist, counselor, author and speaker. His new book is called "The Power of a Teacher."

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From handcuffs to Harvard

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There is no reason, no reason at all, why Adam Sáenz should be at this place in life: He has two Ph.D.s, a career in psychology, a solid marriage and four children.

The odds favored death or jail and, for a while, that seemed to be where he was headed.

Life started out fine for Sáenz. He spent his early years in southeast Houston, the third child of hardworking parents. But when he was 8, his parents, beset by a rocky marriage, decided to move back to the Rio Grande Valley, closer to relatives.

"I thought I was white until I was 8 years old," he says with a chuckle now. Moving didn't help, and within a year the parents split up.

That's when the trouble started. "I didn't fit in. I didn't grow up there," he says.

Sáenz started running with older kids, bad ones. Two friends were murdered in a drug deal gone bad. Some kids broke into his house and sexually assaulted a girl in front of him.

He never talked about any of it, but he acted out in school. "I was always going to the office or from the office," he says.

Finally, Sáenz was arrested for possession of marijuana and found himself handcuffed in the back seat of a police cruiser.

He was in sixth grade.

His mother packed Sáenz off to live with family friends in then-rural Katy. "It was a tiny town, out in the sticks, and it was culture shock again. I'd forgotten how to be white."

Nevertheless, these were good years, and he made decent grades in school. Then, when he graduated from high school, "the bottom fell out," he says. Drugs were back in his life, and so was a crippling depression.

He found himself working as a dishwasher in San Antonio and sleeping on the floor of a friend's apartment. In a tiny closet were his most prized possessions: journals he had written in since he was a boy, when writing was the only therapy he had.

One day he happened to pull out two pieces of paper he'd forgotten about. They were letters from two teachers in Katy, Jo Ella Exley and Polly McRoberts. "You are extremely talented and intelligent, but most importantly, you have a good heart," read one. "Don't quit writing (especially in your journal). Someday it may be the basis for your book," said the other.

"It was so kind and so loving, I could not reconcile it with who I was," Sáenz says now. But it gave him heart. He decided to take one English course at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He passed, much to his surprise, so he took another. Just shy of 27, he got his B.A. in English from UTSA.

This gave him the confidence to go for a master's in counseling, and when he got that, he said to himself, "I think I'm pretty good at school."

A Ph.D. at Texas A&M followed, with clinical training at Harvard Medical School and post-doc at Brown. Then came a second doctorate, in pastoral counseling, with a residency at Oxford.

Sáenz, now 45 and living in Bryan, and his wife had three children, but two years ago they adopted a girl, now 12, from a difficult background. "Watching her heal and regress, heal and regress, has been such a wonder," he says. "She is saving me."

On his wrist he has tattooed the first two measures of "Amazing Grace."

He still gives credit to his teachers, even dedicating his book, "The Power of a Teacher," to "every teacher who wants to make a difference."